Strider's Galaxy (33 page)

"Time to go," she said.

Strauss-Giolitto took Pinocchio's other hand.

"Lay off him," said Strider.

"We're going in twos and threes, and this is a three. I want to survive. Pinocchio is my best probability of staying alive."

Strider watched her personnel as they moved away across the desert. The surface offered at best a treacherous footing. A kid fell, making a fountain of sand. Two adults dragged it to its feet. The entire manoeuvre was so incompetent that Strider wouldn't have bet a penny on the family's chances of survival.

"How are we—how is anybody—going to find water or food?" she said as the three of them began to run. It was like wading through the shallows at the edge of the sea.

"Cut down your suit radio," said Pinocchio. "This is a question that is very soon going to occur to everyone else. They are less likely to survive if they worry about this than if they simply get as far away from the
Santa Maria
as they are possibly able."

"None of us have much chance at all," said Strauss-Giolitto.

"Things could be a whole lot worse," said Strider.

"Tell me another one," said Strauss-Giolitto as the three of them leapt cumbersomely over a . . .

"Stop," said Strider. "Have you just seen what I just saw?"

They hurried back to take a better look. The thing hovering centimeters above the surface of the sand was camouflaged, so that from even a few meters away it was hard to spot unless you knew it was there. About a meter square, it looked rather like a trapdoor—in fact,
very
like a trapdoor, with a hinged metal ring on it to aid opening. Strider nervously ran her glove just under its edge, making grooves in the sand there, to reassure herself that the artifact was indeed floating—that there was no mere optical illusion involved. Then, even more nervously, she hooked a finger of her glove through the metal ring, and pulled.

Pulled harder.

The trapdoor opened smoothly, although with some resistance, as if on hydraulics. Gazing down through the opening it revealed, the three of them could see what looked like nothing more exotic than a metal ladder, reaching far beneath them into darkness.

"Get working on the general suit-radio frequency, Pinocchio, and tell everyone to come over here. We're going down."

"Is this wise?"

"It's got to be a better chance than milling around in the desert just waiting to be picked off before we die of thirst. Do the message on the commline as well, in case people have their suit radios switched off, or have moved on to personal frequencies."

Strider looked at Strauss-Giolitto. Even through the slightly darkened glass of the tall woman's visor, Strider could see that she looked terrified. She reached out a gloved hand and Strauss-Giolitto clumsily took it, as if she were a young child needing reassurance from her mother.

Strider could see, in the distance, pairs and trios of suited figures turning towards them. A few, however, were still trudging resolutely in the other direction.

"Images," she subvocalized, "contact the rest. Then tell me what's actually at the bottom of that pit?"

A REASONABLE CHANCE OF ESCAPE,
fluted the voice of Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Can you be a bit more precise than that?"

The Preeae.

"I thought they were extinct."

Everybody does. That's why they're not. A few of them survived the torching of their planet, and they've built up an underground culture. We've already started speaking with them on your behalf, but for reasons that can be imagined they are virulently xenophobic. It is hard to persuade them that you are allies, but it seems likely that they will afford you safe passage through their tunnels.

"Where do the tunnels go to?"

The nearest other exit is in the foothills of a mountain range some four hundred and fifty kilometers from here. I should add that the Preeae are not best pleased by the fact that you have drawn attention to this ingress. As soon as you are all through it they will have to move it, so that the Autarch's people do not discover it. This will cause the Preeae logistical difficulties in the future, because it was placed precisely here for very good reasons.

"How much of this did you know before we crashlanded?" The first pair of personnel were just arriving. They had secondary retinal screens across both eyes, so it was impossible for Strider to recognize them through their visors.

Nothing. If you had not discovered this entrance we might never have known anything about the Preeae's presence. The neural camouflage they have erected is very sophisticated indeed. We had not been aware that any culture in The Wondervale was capable of creating this.

"Bit of a long shot that we discovered them, then, isn't it?" said Strider, her eyes roaming across the wastes of sand around them. The
Santa Maria
looked in a way like a grounded hawk. It was the first time she had really seen the outside of her redesigned vessel except through the Pockets, and it was also the moment when she was abandoning it to whatever fate the Autarchy's forces visited upon it. She did not consider herself a sentimentalist, but a twinge of remorse passed through her, as if she had just betrayed an old and trusted friend. A captain should go down with her ship, and all that. No: she mustn't let herself start thinking like that. The
Santa Maria
was a collection of advanced technology, of bits of metal and circuitry. It was just an object, not a personality.

WE EXPECT COINCIDENCES,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"Run that past me again."

OUR REALITY ONLY PARTIALLY OVERLAPS WITH YOURS. THE NATURE OF THAT OVERLAP IS SUCH THAT "LONG SHOTS," AS YOU CALL THEM, HAPPEN VERY FREQUENTLY TO US WHEN WE ARE IN THE WONDERVALE.

"Good thing we had you along, then."

The Image quite clearly failed to recognize the tone of irony in her subvocalization.
YOU WOULD ALL HAVE BEEN DEAD WITHIN HOURS OF ENTERING THE WONDERVALE HAD IT NOT BEEN FOR OUR INTERVENTION. MAGLITTEL WOULD HAVE BLASTED YOUR VESSEL TO SMALL PIECES.

"Four hundred and fifty kilometers is a very long way to walk. Our suits have air enough for only a couple of dozen hours."

THE PREEAE HAVE A TRANSPORTATION SYSTEM, USING A NETWORK OF TUNNELS. BUT YES, SOONER OR LATER YOU'RE GOING TO HAVE TO ABANDON YOUR SUITS AND TAKE YOUR CHANCES. HEARTFIRE IS ALREADY DOING HIS BEST TO ANALYZE THE LOCAL MICRO-ECOLOGY TO TRY TO DETERMINE IF THERE ARE ANY MICROBES THAT MIGHT CAUSE YOU HARM. THIS WILL TAKE HIM SOME TIME, AND IT IS POSSIBLE THAT HIS RESULTS WILL NOT BE ENTIRELY ACCURATE. BUT HE WILL DO HIS BEST.

There was now a large cluster of suited personnel standing round the open trapdoor. Strider felt a pang as she saw the children among them. Children always looked so pathetic in spacesuits, as if the Universe should have been designed so that there was no need for such protections.

She explained the situation tersely.

"Pinocchio," she said, "tell me how many more people are still to get here."

"There are three others. I am finding it impossible to contact them either by commline or by radio."

"Is there any chance of your just physically going and getting them?" said Strider.

"Not in time."

"Then we leave them."

When the volume of the shouts of protest over her suit radio grew too oppressive she turned it off. She wasn't going to sacrifice forty-odd for the sake of three. Almost as important, she wasn't going to risk losing Pinocchio, whose abilities might quite possibly make the subtle difference between the survival and extinction of the rest of the party.

"Can you come with me inside my suit?" she said to Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

CERTAINLY. I ALREADY AM INSIDE YOUR SUIT.

"Good. I think I'm going to need you."

SO DO I.

Once she sensed that the argument had died down she tongued her suit radio back on again.

"There will be no further debate about this matter," she said curtly. "I'll be the first to descend into the pit. You can decide among yourselves who is the next to follow me, but whoever it is must wait at least five minutes before they do so—got that? I'm going to leave an open line to First Officer O'Sondheim, and report to him exactly what I'm doing every step of the way. I don't want anyone intruding on that line—it's to be just him and me. If I meet a fatal reception you must disperse once more, under his general instructions. Clear?"

Heads nodded. Enough heads to assure Strider she didn't have a revolution on her hands.

"He and Pinocchio will be the last to follow down."

She locked her radio on to O'Sondheim's.

"Got that, Danny?"

"Loud and clear."

She fumbled her hand free of Strauss-Giolitto's and, not allowing herself too much time to think, dropped to her knees and hoisted herself in through the dark opening. She fastened the end of her belt-rope to the uppermost rung, though she didn't think the precaution would do her much good if she fell. It felt to her as if there were a very long drop beneath. She could hear the pulse in her temple beating more swiftly than it should be. What Ten Per Cent Extra Free had told her had been less than entirely reassuring. This might be a long climb down to disaster.

"How are things going with the Preeae?" she subvocalized to him.

THE NEGOTIATIONS ARE STILL . . . DELICATE.

"That bad, huh?"

THEY COULD BE VERY CONSIDERABLY WORSE.

"What do you think my chances are?" She was moving smoothly down the ladder now. After the first couple of dozen rungs it began to take on a helical form, which oddly enough she found less vertiginous than if it had continued straight downwards. However different the Preeae might be physically from human beings, there was obviously some psychological similarity.

She tried to stop her breathing sounding so loud. Although O'Sondheim seemed to have discovered his own inner strength since the terror to which he'd succumbed when the
Santa Maria
had fallen through the wormhole, she still wasn't sure quite how reliable he would be under pressure. He had refused her orders when she'd told him they had to flee from Spindrift's outer moon. If he picked up from her breathing quite how frightened she was, he might be infected and spread the fear on to others. She wished she could have asked Nelson or Leander or Pinocchio to take on the task of ushering the personnel into the pit, but that would probably, besides destroying his belief in himself, have created even more panic among the personnel than anything O'Sondheim could do. With luck, Pinocchio would cope with any problems.

She looked up. The square of skylight above her seemed very small and a very long way away. She tongued on her suit lights, and kept going downwards. In front of her, between the rungs, the lights reflected off a slightly damp-seeming stone surface. The rungs themselves were rusted with age; she told herself not to think much about how fragile some of them might be.

Strider looked upwards again. Perhaps there was a mote of daylight visible above, perhaps not.

"I'm still going down," she said. "Nothing to worry about so far, Danny. The ladder starts twisting after a while, which might faze some people."

"Message received and understood, Leonie," said O'Sondheim's voice inside her suit. "There aren't any signs yet of hostile forces. We're lucky. Keep your fingers crossed."

"Ever tried crossing your fingers when you're climbing down a ladder in a spacesuit?" It was all right to breathe more loudly now; O'Sondheim would simply assume it was because of the physical exertion.

"Well, you could try crossing your eyes instead." He was sounding perfectly confident. She hoped he stayed that way.

Strider became aware that there was a source of light beneath her. Pausing for a moment, she looked downwards and saw a yellow glow. It seemed improbably far away, as if she were crawling backwards down towards the core of the planet.

"Still there's been no contact," she reported to O'Sondheim. "The ladder has so far been in reasonably good repair, although the rungs are a bit rusty in places. Tell folk it might be wise not to try doing any acrobatics as they descend. Oh, yeah, and any kid big enough to climb down alone should do so rather than be carried. The less weight anyone puts on this ladder the better. But it seems OK to me."

She briefly tongued off her suit radio.

"How much further am I going?" she said.

YOU WILL REACH THE BOTTOM WITHIN ABOUT FIVE MINUTES, AT YOUR CURRENT RATE OF PROGRESS,
said Ten Per Cent Extra Free.

"I'm shit scared."

THIS IS EVIDENT TO US FROM THE INCREASED RATE OF MUCH OF YOUR METABOLISM.

"I haven't had any ziprite in years, but I sure as hell could do with a jolt of it right now."

She tongued the radio back on again. "Ten Per Cent Extra Free thinks I should get to the foot of the ladder in a few minutes, Danny. Stop anyone else coming down until I get there."

"Understood."

She tried to increase the pace of her descent as much as she could without doing anything dangerous. The sooner she met with the Preeae and they either killed her or didn't kill her the happier she'd be. She couldn't imagine the state of a technology that could construct something as advanced as the trapdoor and at the same time relied on a simple ladder for the rest of the ingress. And yet, she reflected again, there was something pleasingly human about it—a neat mixture of the simple and the complicated. Over the centuries, humanity had made considerable technological changes in some areas but had wisely left other things alone, or reverted to the earlier models. For example, a door on hinges could be relied upon to open almost all of the time; a photosensitive door that nictated as people approached it was a pretty neat gadget, but if something should go wrong with it . . .

She was letting her mind wander.

"I've lost track of the time," she said to O'Sondheim.

"It's three and a half minutes since last you spoke to me," he said. "We were beginning to get quite worried. At least we could hear you breathing."